Ethnic, racial and cultural stereotypes on commercials, comedies and cartoons are NOT acceptable in today's societal norms, esp. we became opposing of racism, as well sexism, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ableism and ageism. Either this attitude started in the 1930s by the MPAA banned defamatory imagery of groups of people in film, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and PCness was a 1990s trend.
3 examples are the Alka-Seltzer ad from 1969 features an Italian-American family, actors in a commercial take set, the 1966 ad of Mountain Dew features poor whites or hillbillies with the commercial version of the soft drink, and the 1970 Fritos ad starring their retired Mexican character the Frito Bandito. (all can be found on Youtube).
My wife, who's of Mexican (technically Spanish and Apache), Italian and Filipino descent doesn't take offense from these commercials. I'm of half-French/Flemish, Scottish, German and Cherokee Indian descent. I've seen western movies portray Native Americans as savages and a movie character Detective Clouseau of the Pink Panther anthology played by Peter Sellers received negative attention in France for being a very "crude" French stereotype.
